An acoustic study on diphthongs in conversational Central Australian Aboriginal English

Abstract

This paper investigates the acoustic properties of diphthongs in Central Australian Aboriginal English (CAAE), an Aboriginal English variety spoken in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, Northern Territory. We analysed vowel duration, formant trajectory, and acoustic distance measure in tokens from conversational speech from six female CAAE speakers. The analysis included six diphthongs /æɪ əʉ oɪ ɑe æɔ ɪə/ and two long monophthongs /iː eː/, which potentially also had some dynamic features. The results suggest that CAAE has the same phonological diphthong inventory as Mainstream Australian English (MAusE), but differs from MAusE phonetically in a number of ways. When individual speakers were analysed separately, we observed potential effects of multilingualism on diphthong production, as multilingual speakers at times had different realisations from monolingual speakers. The present study contributes to the documentation of an under-studied English variety used by Aboriginal Australians as their primary language, reflecting the current language ecology in the local area.